I walked on. I had to find them a place to make a stand.
“I’ve not heard an untoward sound for an hour,” said Philo, passing Voushanti a waterskin. We had climbed to the brink of a limestone scarp to rest and drink. “We should get away from here and make camp, else we’ll not be able to move by morning.”
“No,” I whispered, plastering myself to the ground and peering over the edge of the scarp into bottomless darkness. The creeping up my back felt like an army of spiders. “They’re still coming. I need to understand how they can stay so close on our trail in the night.” I had my bent to guide me, but how could the Harrowers determine which crisscrossing trail of churned snow we had trod the most recently?
Voushanti hushed the two young warriors and wormed up beside me. “I sense them, too.”
Before very long, yellow light blazed from the wood—a torch, I thought as it moved through the trees. But the wind neither shook nor snuffed it. The silent procession passed below us like wraiths. Perhaps forty men. Fewer horses. They had muted their harness with rags. Only their tread in the snow and the occasional whuffle of a beast marked their passage.
Their leader bore the light—a gleaming ball of piss-yellow brilliance that emanated directly from his hand. And as he walked, he held one hand in front of him, fingers stiffly spread, and he turned his head from side to side, sniffing, his nostrils flared wide like some great hound. Sorcery. I knew it. As he vanished into the thicker trees, a gust of wind swept down the scarp to flutter his cloak—worn purple velvet with a dagged hem. The dog-faced man had tasted Boreas’s blood, watched the priestess lash Gildas’s back, and stood on the fortress walls with Sila Diaglou as Abbot Luviar was gutted. I prayed he would rot in this demon wood.
“Come on,” I said through gritted teeth. “We need to move faster. That one might have other skills.” He was Sila Diaglou’s companion in slaughter, either a pureblood or a mixed-blood mage powerful enough to create light in this overwhelming night.
Though purebloods were unmatched in native talent for sorcery by virtue of their untainted Aurellian descent, any ordinary with a trace of Aurellian blood carried potential for the bent—as did Prince Osriel by virtue of his pureblood mother. Most mixed-bloods became market tricksters, potion sellers, or alley witches, like old Salamonde, who had taught me the doulon spell. Registry breeding laws had assured that little talent remained outside pureblood families, but always a few took their talents seriously, training and testing with others of their kind, calling themselves mages. Purebloods disdained them, of course, and named mageworks trickery. Prince Osriel had already taught me elsewise.
Another day. Another night. The rapacious cold cracked bone and spirit, dulled the mind, and transformed limbs and heart to lead. Using my aching hips and legs to break a trail through thigh-deep snow, laced with broken tree limbs and frozen bracken, became purest misery. Sticks snagged clothes and flesh. Pits or sinkholes beneath the crusted snow left me floundering on my face at every other step. The sweat of my exertions froze beneath my layered garments.
I clung to the gray guide thread in my mind, checked and rechecked it, pouring magic into each test to be sure I followed true. My companions dragged me up when I fell, brushed me off, and trod carefully in my steps. We had to lose these devils, else they would follow us to Gillarine. Stearc’s clever choice of a rendezvous now seemed incalculably stupid.
We pushed across a broad meadow. It troubled me to find a clearing where my instincts said none should be, yet I dared not stop to assay another trial of magic, lest I freeze there in the open. It might have been a single hour or ten sunless days that we traversed that meadow.
My head swam with sleepless confusion, my frozen flesh no longer able to feel the pull of north or south. Southwesterly should take us higher, so that we would emerge, a day or so from now, atop Pilcher’s Hill where Voushanti could mount a defense. Yet every instinct cried that safety lay downward. And downward did not feel like southwest. Thoroughly muddled, I fell to my knees at the bottom of a long slope and scrabbled in the snow.
“Where are we?” gasped Voushanti, even his leathern toughness on the verge of shredding. “We’ll have no feet to stand on or hands to wield a sword, if you don’t find us a place to make a fight.”
“Just need to find the blasted hill. This terrain is all wrong.”
My fingers might have been wooden clubs for all I could feel of them when I touched earth. I poured magic from my core but sensed nothing of the land. Which way?
An owl screeched from atop a spindly pine. I rubbed my frozen hands together. Breathed on them. Stuffed them under my arms, trying to warm them enough so they could feel. Another shriek and a spread of dark wings drew my eye to the treetops. And there, shining in yellow-white splendor between the branches, hung Escalor, the guide star. North and south settled into their proper positions in my head.
“Mother Samele’s tits!” Sitting back on my heels, I laughed aloud at ignorant fools and their earnest blindness.
“Spirits of night, lunatic, will you be quiet?” Voushanti would have throttled me if he’d not been doubled up by a spreading beech, his lungs wheezing like a smith’s bellows. “Never knew a man could move so fast in such cursed weather and still have breath to cackle like a gamecock.”
I pressed my wet, filthy sleeve across my mouth to contain the hilarity that simple sense could not. Bound up in pureblood sorcery and earth-borne mystery, it had never crossed my mind to look up for guidance. The owl’s dark wingspan ruffled against the starry night.
As I pleaded with my aching legs to unbend and bear my weight again, I watched the kindly bird preening. Thus I caught the glimmer of sapphire brilliance in the leafless branches of a giant beech nearby. I held breath and dared not blink. From the snarl of twigs and branches, an arm scribed with blue fire reached out to host the wing-spread owl’s claws for a few heartbeats before the bird took flight. My heart came near stopping.
Twice in the past few days I’d believed us irretrievably blocked, facing the choice to be overrun by our pursuers or reverse course and meet them head-on. In both instances escape had come by seeming chance. A falling rock, dislodged by some scuttering animal, had exposed a stairlike descent of an impossibly sheer scarp. A bolting fox had revealed an unlikely passage through an avalanche slide the size of half a mountain. Now I wondered. Chance had never been my ally.
We could not linger. But I touched the earth once more and sent my whispered gratitude into the roots and rock, hoping that the one who aided us would hear. Would he have a dragon scribed on his face? Were his eyes the color of autumn aspen? Was that arm the same that had offered me refuge in an aspen grove as I fled Gillarine? Earth’s Mother, how I longed to know.
Of course, the Danae despised humankind. How could they not, when the Harrowers’ grotesque rites poisoned them? Yes, they had driven my grandfather mad, but he had stolen something precious from them. Danae were the essence of magic, the gift of beauty and grace below heaven. Even angels brought down the god’s righteous fury on sinners.
We ran. Onward. Downward. Slipping and sliding on wooded banks. The owl arrowed southward ahead of us, as if scribing the path across inked vellum, and my fatigued mind gratefully relinquished the guide thread it had gripped for eight unrelenting days.
Soon the trees thinned, and a flat wilderness of mottled white spread out before us. Darker patches marred the starlit landscape as if unseen trees cast shadows on the snow. Clouds burgeoned behind the ridge we’d just descended, hiding Escalor and her companion stars. Wind gusts brought flakes drifting from the heights. We had to hurry. If any of our pursuers were yet mounted, flat ground would be our end.